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Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Featured: Three From Wakefield Press

Pataphysical Essays, Rene Daumal
Paperback

Pataphysics: the science of
imaginary solutions, of laws governing exceptions and of the laws
describing the universe supplementary to this one. Alfred Jarry’s
posthumous novel, Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician,
first appeared in 1911, and over the course of the century, his
pataphysical supersession of metaphysics would influence everyone from
Marcel Duchamp and Boris Vian to Umberto Eco and Jean Baudrillard. In
1948 in Paris, a group of writers and thinkers would found The College
of ’Pataphysics, still going strong today. The iconoclastic René Daumal
was the first to elaborate upon Jarry’s unique and humorous philosophy.
Though Daumal is better known for his unfinished novel Mount Analogue
and his refusal to be adopted by the Surrealist movement, this newly
translated volume of writings offers a glimpse at an often overlooked
Daumal: Daumal the pataphysician. Pataphysical Essays collects
Daumal’s overtly pataphysical writings from 1929 to 1941, from his
landmark exposition on pataphysics and laughter to his late essay, “The
Pataphysics of Ghosts.” Daumal’s “Treatise on Patagrams” offers the
reader everything from a recipe for the disintegration of a photographer
to instructions on how to drill a fount of knowledge in a public
urinal. This collection also collects Daumal’s little-known column for
the Nouvelle Revue Française, “Pataphysics This Month.” Reading
like a deranged encyclopedia, the articles describe a new mythology for
the field of science, and amply demonstrate that the twentieth century
had been a distinctly pataphysical era.

Poet, philosopher, and self-taught Sanskrit scholar René Daumal
(1908–1944) devoted himself to a lifelong attempt to think through
death by means of what he called “experimental metaphysics”: an attempt
to address metaphysical questions through scientific methodology. After
co-founding the iconoclastic journal Le Grand Jeu and rejecting
overtures from the Surrealist movement, he abandoned the literary path
to become a disciple of the spiritual teacher George Gurdjieff.

The High Life, Jean-Pierre Martinet
Paperback

Adolphe Marlaud’s rule of conduct is simple: live as
little as possible so as to suffer as little as possible. For Marlaud,
this involves carrying out a meager existence on rue Froidevaux in
Paris, tending to his father’s grave in the cemetery across the street,
and earning the ghost of a living through a
part-time job at the funerary shop on the corner. It does not, however,
take into account the amorous intentions of the obese concierge of his
building, who has set her widowed sights on his diminutive frame, and
whose aggressive overtures will set the wheels in motion for a burlesque and obscene tragedy. Originally published in 1979, The High Life
introduces cult French author Jean-Pierre Martinet into English. It is a
novella that perfectly outlines the dark fare of Martinet’s vision: the
terrors of loneliness, the grotesque buffoonery of sexual relations,
the essential humiliation of the human condition, and the ongoing trauma
of twentieth-century history.

Jean-Pierre Martinet
(1944–1993) wrote only a handful of novels, including what is largely
regarded as his masterpiece, the psychosexual study of horror and
madness, Jérôme. Largely ignored during his lifetime, his star
has only recently begun to shine in France, and he is now regarded as an
overlooked French successor to Dostoyevsky. Reading like an unsettling
love child of Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Jim Thompson, Martinet’s work
explores the grimly humorous possibilities of unlimited pessimism

The Perpetual Motion Machine: The Story Of An Invention, Paul Scheerbart

Paperback

In the last days of 1907, the German novelist and
exponent of glass architecture Paul Scheerbart embarked upon an attempt
to invent a perpetual motion machine. For the next two and a half years
he would document his ongoing efforts (and failures) from his
laundry-room-cum-laboratory, hiring plumbers and mechanics to construct
his models while spinning out a series of imagined futures that his
invention-in-the-making was going to enable. The Perpetual Motion Machine: The Story of an Invention,
originally published in German in 1910, is an indefinable blend of
diary, diagrams and digression that falls somewhere between memoir and
reverie: a document of what poet and translator Andrew Joron calls a
“two-and-a-half-year-long tantrum of the imagination.” Shifting
ambiguously from irony to enthusiasm and back, Scheerbart’s unique
amalgamation of visionary humor and optimistic failure ultimately proves
to be a more literary invention than scientific: a perpetual motion of a
fevered imagination that reads as if Robert Walser had tried his hand
at science fiction. With “toiling wheels” inextricably embedded in his
head, Scheerbart’s visions of rising globalization, ecological
devastation, militaristic weapons of mass destruction and the possible
end of literature soon lead him to dread success more than failure. The Perpetual Motion Machine is an ode to the fertility of misery and a battle cry of the imagination against praxis.

Paul Scheerbart (1863–1915)
was a novelist, playwright, poet, newspaper critic, draughtsman,
visionary, proponent of glass architecture, and would-be inventor of
perpetual motion. Dubbed the “wise clown” by his contemporaries, he
opposed the naturalism of his day with fantastical fables and
interplanetary satires that were to influence Expressionist authors and
the German Dada movement, and which helped found German science fiction.
After suffering a nervous breakdown over the mounting carnage of World
War I, Scheerbart starved to death in what was rumored to have been a
protest against the war.